By Brahma Chellaney
Twenty years ago this month, the foreign ministers of Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first meeting of the BRICs. Since then, the grouping has been formalised—the first BRIC summit took place in June 2009—and expanded, with South Africa joining in 2011 and several more countries later coming on board, either as full members or official partners.
Today, the BRICS represents a highly consequential experiment in international cooperation, which epitomises the gradual rebalancing of global power away from the West and the emergence of a multipolar order. Few acronyms have undergone as dramatic an evolution as the BRICS. Coined by Jim O’Neill, then of Goldman Sachs, in 2001 to encapsulate four fast-growing emerging markets, the “BRICs” grouping has developed into the BRICS, an 11-country political and economic coalition and an increasingly influential voice for the Global South.
Since adding Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to its ranks in 2024-25, the BRICS accounts for nearly half of the world’s population and about 40% of global GDP (in purchasing-power-parity terms). By contrast, the G7 accounts for less than 10% of the global population and less than 30% of world GDP. Whereas the BRICS’ share of the global economy continues to grow, the pace of productivity and economic growth in advanced economies has been declining steadily since the 1990s. This economic reversal is increasingly matched in the geopolitical domain, with Western global dominance giving way to a more diffuse distribution of power and influence.
Amid this transformation—the likes of which occur only once every 50–100 years—the BRICS has challenged the assumption that global governance should remain centred on the Western-led institutions established after World War II. For non-Western countries, the BRICS represents a hedge against rising economic and geopolitical uncertainty—generated, not least, by a United States seemingly bent on withdrawing from global leadership—and an institutional platform for advancing strategic autonomy and broadening economic cooperation. Small wonder there has been such enthusiasm for joining: more than three dozen countries have formally applied or expressed interest in becoming members, including Turkey, a NATO member, and Bahrain, the primary operational hub for US naval forces in the Middle East.
The BRICS also has ten “partner countries”—Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Cuba, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Uganda, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam—which can participate in summits. This framework helps to expand the BRICS’ network for cooperation and strengthen its ability to represent the Global South, without jeopardising cohesion.
The BRICS is much more than a symbolic grouping—merely a message to the world that the era of Western dominance is coming to an end. The grouping has made tangible progress on institution-building. The New Development Bank (NDB) is the first multilateral development bank with global scope conceived and led solely by emerging economies, with the founding BRICS members holding equal shares and voting rights. By contrast, the United States is the largest shareholder at both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, where it holds effective veto power.
Unlike these US-led institutions, the NDB does not attach political conditions to its infrastructure financing, allowing borrowers to retain greater policy autonomy. BRICS has also been working to reduce vulnerabilities within the international financial system. Contrary to speculation, a single BRICS currency akin to the euro is not on the agenda. Instead, the upcoming summit will focus on expanding trade settlement in national currencies, improving interoperability among members’ digital-payment systems, linking central-bank digital currencies, and developing alternative cross-border payment infrastructure.
The goal is not to upend the global financial system and supplant the US dollar, which still accounts for about 57% of foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks worldwide, but rather to strengthen resilience against external financial shocks.
As much progress as the BRICS has made over the last 20 years, however, the grouping also faces significant headwinds, rooted not least in its exceptional internal diversity. The BRICS includes liberal democracies and authoritarian states, leading energy exporters and major energy importers, manufacturing powers and commodity economies. The grouping also includes geopolitical rivals: China and India, Iran and Saudi Arabia, and Egypt and Ethiopia.
Divisions exist even among its founding members, with Brazil and India generally advocating reform of existing international institutions, while China and Russia seek to challenge the US-led world order. Diversity brings different ideas and advantages to the table, and ideological uniformity and close strategic alignment are not necessarily prerequisites to cooperation. But a highly diverse grouping, with sharply divergent priorities and geopolitical concerns, will always struggle to forge consensus. Every round of enlargement compounds the challenge, even as it raises the BRICS’ profile as a broadly representative international coalition.
As the group convenes in New Delhi for its 18th summit, one might ask whether it has lived up to its original promise. If that promise was to establish a monetary union, a single market, or a tightly integrated political alliance, the answer is plainly no. But if it was to reshape international relations, broaden the space available to emerging economies on the world stage, strengthen South-South cooperation, and increase pressure for reform of existing international institutions, the BRICS has exceeded expectations.
More fundamentally, the BRICS has normalised an idea that once seemed impossible: that emerging economies can cooperate with one another, build their own institutions, and change how the international order is organized. That is no small feat.
The writer is Professor Emeritus of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin.
